Five Minutes To Improve Your Turnout Everyday

Turnout is one of the key characteristics of Irish Dancing - it is a basic that we will have been taught from our very first Irish Dance classes. Just like everything, some Dancers find this easy, but other Dancers struggle with this, but don’t worry, that’s where we come in to help. 

In 2024 we ran a 5-day Turnout Challenge which helped us to see results like these…

We were so excited about these and if you haven’t already done our Gold Club five-day challenge then you need to get started! But, if you only have five minutes everyday to work on your turnout, then this is the exercise I recommend that you do. 

What 

The exercise we are going to focus on is our Fire Hydrants! These are exercises that we have been doing in our Strength classes for a while, because they are a fantastic exercise to strengthen your glutes and improve your turnout - and keep this turnout looking just as show stopping at the end of the Dance as it did at the start! 

Why

Fire Hydrants are such an effective move for Irish Dancers because: 

• They strengthen your glutes
• They work on your hip mobility, increasing your range of motion
• They do not require any equipment 
• Helps to reduce imbalances in our bodies 
• They don’t require you to make any noise so can be done in bedrooms, or in apartments 

How

So, how do we do them? Follow these steps to start working on your turnout today: 

1. Start in a tabletop position like the image of Meg below - really focus on having your knees directly underneath your hips and your wrists underneath your shoulders. You should see a square shape underneath you.

2. From here, using one leg at a time, raise your knee and foot to the side. It is important to keep your foot flexed (not pointed) and your knee in line with your ankle/foot. Here is an image of Meg doing this step….

What we DON’T want to see is this….

Your foot dropping below your knee when in the raised position. 

3. Make sure that you move your body slowly and focus on maintaining control. Don’t worry if you can’t get yours as high as Megs or if you find that one side is a lot different to the other. Return back to the first tabletop position and repeat. Do this exercise 4x on each leg. 

If you are looking to improve your turnout, then we recommend you complete our 2024 Magic Turnout Challenge before Monday 3rd February when we are running out Magic Turnout Challenge 2.0! This is going to be even more challenging than the 2024 challenge, so make sure you have completed that one first! 

Join the MWM Gold Club for £35 per month and take part in our thousands of classes, online community, monthly goal-setting sessions, monthly Correction Clinics with Meg, and our previous eight challenges!!